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Description
After almost 50 years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children are all making catastrophes of their own lives. Enid however, has her heart set on one last family Christmas.
Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis
Summary
As the aging patriarch slips into dementia, a Midwestern family prepares to gather for ‘one last christmas’ in the parents small home town of ‘St Jude’ (The patron Saint of lost causes). Familial pathos and melodrama is writ large.
Memorable Quotes
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“The Universe was mechanistic: the father spoke, the son reacted.”
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““Take it easy”. The phrase seemed to Alfred an eastern blight, a fitting epitaph for a once-great state, Ohio, that parasitic teamsters had sucked nearly dry. Nobody in St Jude would dare tell him to take it easy. On the high prairie where he’d grown up, a person who took it easy wasn’t much of a man. Now came a new effeminate generation for whom ‘easygoing’ was a compliment…. ‘take it easy’ was the watchword of these super friendly young men, the token of their over familiarity, the false reassurance that enabled them to ignore the filth they worked in.””
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“Gary in recent years had observed, with plate tectonically cumulative anxiety, that population was continuing to flow out of the Midwest and toward the cooler coasts…. Gary wished that all further migration <could> be banned and all Midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity.”
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“The correction, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.”
First Sentence
THE MADNESS of an autumn prairie cold front coming through.
Table of Contents
Authors & Contributors
- Jonathan Franzen (Author)
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